Business organizations can engage in a planning process to help formulate business strategy, generate budgets, forecast performance, manage projects, consolidate tasks, and support operational business activities. Driven by unpredictable and fast-changing market conditions, business organizations can have many types of plans in use. Without a single source of data, however, planning processes can be plagued by inconsistent, incorrect, obsolete, or missing data.
Further, in certain instances, plans are generated by different users with little coordination between them. Planning applications can provide functionality for scheduling, workflow and notification. Users can implement pre-configured processes or create new customized processes specific to the organization. Generating a plan to address problems or identify opportunities can involve forecasting future conditions and providing help for model scenarios. Users can view, modify, store, and access data at different aggregation levels. In some instances, the users may need context data associated with the same plan from various operational applications at the same point in time. A business application, however, cannot be separated from operational and analytical applications.
Typically, business planning functions such as copying, forecasting, disaggregation, etc. need to manage a huge volume of data. However, end users expect response times in less than a second. For flexibility reasons, business planning applications are frequently designed as spreadsheet applications with local data. Further, in large enterprises, business planning applications need to be combined with centralized data to provide consistency.